caption:
KING BUGS: Here he is, the star of "That's All Folks: The Art
of Warner Bros. Cartoons," which opened April 23 at the James
A. Michener Art Museum, in Doylestown and will be on view through
July 3. For this show there will be a $4 charge in addition to
regular museum admission, which is $6.50; senior citizens age
60 or older are $6; students are $4. Members and children under
6 are admitted free. The museum is located at 138 South Pine Street
in Doylestown. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Friday, 10 a.m.
to 4:30 p.m.; Saturday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; and Sunday, noon to
5 p.m. The museum will be open until 9 on Wednesday evenings.
For further information, call (215) 340-9800 or visit www.michenerartmuseum.org.

Looney Tunes: An Art Museum Saturday Matinee

The James
A. Michener Art Museum

Stuart Mitchner

The past few shows at the Michener have offered museumgoers quite
a ride, from the razzledazzle of Red Grooms to photographs of
the Nazi Camps to Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies. Two months
ago the Lower Gallery was hushed, the walls haunted by stark black
and white images from the crime scenes of the Holocaust. Now the
imagery is no less stark but vibrantly bright, the walls are ringing
with primary colors out of Saturday matinee America, and the rooms
echo with the voices of children whose parents are treating them
to an early taste of art gallery manners while offering profound
pronouncements such as "I don't like Porky Pig" and
"I feel sorry for the coyote." As for the kids, they're
too young to have grown up with Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, though
they obviously know them from the endlessly available cartoons
on cable TV. And, no surprise, Bugs Bunny's the favorite, just
as he was between 1945 and 1960 when Warner Bros. was producing
the most popular cartoons on the market. That "wascally wabbitt,"
King Bugs, the master of mayhem, the looniest of the lot, also
happens to be the natural enemy of pomposity and high art, including,
of course, attitudes associated with the realm he rules at the
Michener's exhibition, "That's All Folks: The Best of Warner
Bros. Cartoons."

Bugs Bunny began cavorting on movie
screens during the Second World War. While the death camp horrors
were taking place, he was featured in The Fighting 69th, Herr
Meets Hare, and Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips (the Michener
show includes a drawing of Bugs as a geisha from that one), which
inspired critic Manny Farber to call him, tongue somewhat in cheek,
"a one-animal advertisement of the moral that unadulterated
torturing of your fellow man pays off." Meanwhile, the morale
of combat-weary American soldiers was being at least temporarily
revived as they watched Bugs put his adversaries through hilarious
caricatures of warfare (Bugs says "this means war" and
"them's fighting words" almost as often as he says "What's
up, Doc?"). In fact, the dynamic driving the most successful
Warner Bros. cartoons was conflict: Porky Pig vs Daffy Duck, Bugs
vs Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam, Road Runner vs. Wile E. Coyote,
Sylvester vs. Tweety Bird.

Another of Manny Farber's pronouncements
(this one quoted by the show's curator) was that the best of the
Warner cartoons are "masterpieces." The items on the
gallery walls, however, are not masterpieces but sketches and
notes and rough drafts. The lightning in a bottle that is Bugs
can't siphoned into a frame and hung on the wall minus that smart-aleck
Brooklynese accent and those hyperkinetic moves. The art that
propels Bugs is motion and sound, which means that the artists
credited on many of the works displayed  cartoon auteurs
like Chuck Jones  are mentioned not because they actually
sketched or painted the images but because they brought them to
life and set them in motion against backgrounds painted by artists
Paul Julian, Richard Thomas, and Philip DeGuard. Fortunately,
the organizers of "That's All Folks" have wisely provided
the necessary dimension of action and sound (imagine Bugs Bunny
without the voice of Mel Blanc). Last Saturday people could watch
non-stop Bugs Bunny cartoons onscreen, complete with the all-important
audio equivalent of chaos. Rather than sitting down right away
to watch Bugs destroy painfully pompous matadors and fat preening
opera singers, however, you should walk through the gallery first
while the familiar cartoon soundtrack creates unrelieved sonic
pandemonium in the background, the perfect accompaniment as you
look at the raw material that, no matter how brilliantly done
and displayed, is only the stuff of a work in progress until it
hits the screen. When you sit down and watch the cartoons after
walking through the exhibit, you'll appreciate all the more how
skillfully the bright, static elements you've been gazing at have
been assembled and ignited.

Watching Bugs in action brought
back the special joy kids experienced before the era of cable
and the multiplex. Imagine how it felt after suffering through
a plodding travelogue and some only marginally tolerable short
subjects and previews to see that bright zany bunny face surge
into view on the screen with the familiar jaunty wake-up-everybody
theme music. A classic example shown at the Michener last Saturday
opened with Bugs innocently strumming a mandolin and singing a
song that distracts the aforementioned fat pompous opera singer
so much that the aria he's rehearsing becomes infected with Bugs's
June-moon-spoon nonsense. The opera singer forthwith hammers the
bunny with the mandolin, upon which Bugs says, "I hope you
realize this means war." The tortures thereafter inflicted
on the opera singer culminate in an opera house performance during
which Bugs disguises himself as the conductor Leopold Stokowski
(complete with long hair) and reduces the singer to red-then-blue-faced
writhing agony by having him sustain a single note beyond human
endurance. Bugs even goes off to do some other mischief while
leaving his white conductor's glove suspended in mid-air, still
commanding the thrashing virtuoso to hold that note. Here is where
Chuck Jones and company carry you over the top. You don't have
to be nine again to enjoy the effect of that lone white glove,
not to mention the terrific graphic crescendo that comes when
Bugs brings the entire opera house crashing down on the singer's
head.

"That's All Folks" provides a sense of
the collaborative nature of cartoon-making through the model sheets
containing numerous provisional images of Bugs, Tweety Bird, and
Elmer Fudd with suggestions pencilled at the appropriate places,
such as Tweety's backside ("perky fanny") and beak ("keep
bill small"). For Elmer Fudd, it's a "large fanny"
and "small chin." For the mature Bugs (in his earliest
incarnation he resembles a cute, cuddly Disney bunny): "keep
line of body action simple," "draw ears to suit mood,
whiskers, too," "keep ruff on cheek high: it makes him
look younger," "lots of teeth when necessary,"
and "large flat feet, long hands and fingers."

The
painted backgrounds are among the most interesting things on display.
One worth mentioning is Richard Thomas's background painting for
The Unholy Hare that depicts railroad tracks running into
the moon against a deep blue sky, and Philip DeGuards's painting
of a boxing ring from an unorthodox angle with cigar-smoking men
in the foreground. Another thing that becomes clear the more you
see of the exhibit is how resolute the Warner artists are about
avoiding the Disney look. Some rejected images of Daffy Duck on
view appeared dangerously close to being clones of Disney's Donald.
Longtime Warners storyman Michael Maltese is quoted as saying
the secret of their success was that they made "cartoons
for adults"  as opposed to what the Michener commentary
calls the "soft, sentimental storybookish" world of
Disney.

However different they may be, Warners and Disney
had the same goal in common: making people of all ages laugh.
Laughter equals acclaim, the ultimate justification of a complex,
long-term effort. According to notes accompanying "That's
All Folks," a six-minute cartoon could occupy more than a
dozen artists for anywhere from several months to as long as a
year.

In another current Michener exhibit, "Playing
Around," which features toys designed by artists, sculptor
Alexander Calder is quoted as saying "Art should be happy,"
an idea similar to the one developed in Preston Sturges's 1941
film, Sullivan's Travels. Sullivan is a popular director
of romantic comedies who wants to make a serious "message"
picture (the title he plans to use was borrowed by the Coen brothers
a few years ago for O Brother Where Art Thou?). While living
like a tramp in order to soak up material, Sullivan lands in a
chaingang where the men are treated to a movie after a hard day's
work. A Disney cartoon comes on, Pluto having a bad day, and as
the exhausted, despondent Sullivan looks around at the other exhausted,
despondent convicts in the audience coming alive with laughter,
he realizes the value of his gift for comedy. He experiences it
himself, laughing out loud as the hapless Pluto becomes more and
more entangled in cartoon chaos.

Alexander Calder's idea
of "happy" is actually closer to W.B. Yeats's theme
in Lapis Lazuli: gaiety transcending comedy and tragedy.
Thus, while "Hamlet rambles and Lear rages," Bugs Bunny
brings down the house and the opera singer lives to perform another
aria.